Rude Awakening/ Just another day in Paradise/Up Date

[Sourdough]

Got this from today's Fairbanks Daily News Miner:  2 August 2012:
 
HEALY — Renee and Baxter Mercer, of Healy, were drifting to sleep just after midnight Tuesday when they heard a loud scraping sound on the outside wall of their house, right next to their heads.

They climbed out of bed, looked out the window and saw four grizzly bears trying to force their way into the house.

“They kept trying to get in, standing up, pushing on the kitchen door,” Renee Mercer said.

One climbed on the picnic table, another stood on the porch, a third shoved at the front door and the fourth pushed on the kitchen door.

Baxter Mercer grabbed his gun, a .338-caliber. He reached out of another door and shot over a bear’s head.

“The bear just looked at him and kept trying to get in,” Renee Mercer said. “It was pretty scary, because they were not in one spot. They were moving so fast. With four of them, all moving at once, and it was just dark enough, it wasn’t worth trying a shot.”

A wounded bear, she said, would only aggravate the situation.

“You need more than one shooter,” she said.

A number of people in the Healy area have called the Alaska Department of Fish and Game to report the marauding bears. The advice they got was, “Do what you have to do.”

The bears have been cutting a swath through the area for the past five days — killing livestock, tipping over garbage cans and terrifying many people.

So far, Healy residents have been reluctant to kill the bears. The hope was the bears would keep moving out of town.

They don’t seem to be doing that.

There also was a report of them trying to break into Brent Keith’s home. Attempts to reach him were not successful.

Residents say the group appears to be a sow with three yearling cubs. Mercer described them as “a good size.”

“I’m just glad they didn’t break the big kitchen window. We kept the lights off so they couldn’t see us,” she said.

During their midnight rampage at the Mercer ranch house, the bears munched on a water line, which pops above ground between the home and its well, and also played with and then popped an inner tube used by one of the Mercer teens.

It was a return visit. Four days ago, the bears showed up at the ranch, which is located at the bottom of Lignite Road near the Nenana River. They knocked over a 100-pound cage used for burning trash and tore up a garbage bag filled with fireweed and other brush.

“They’re aggressive, and they’re not afraid of anything,” Mercer said.

Both family dogs took off during the bears’ visit. Despite wearing shock collars that keep them confined to the yard, they ran right through the perimeter fence. The next day, they were found sleeping on the porch of the former Mercer home, two miles away.

One dog came home with a gash on an inner thigh. Mercer doesn’t know if the dog got swiped by a bear or injured the leg some other way.

“It was horror,” Mercer said. “To hear the thumping on the porch here … they definitely wanted in. My adrenaline was pumping. They were everywhere, looking for food.”

They didn’t find any this time.

[Sourdough]

And then today we have this item.  This has made the National News.
 
KENAI, Alaska - Kenai River guide Dustin Klepacki, 22, did not expect to perform a rescue mission when he, his father and their friend floated the upper river last weekend.

They just wanted to avoid all the combat fishing - just float rapids and fish trout down river, he said.

But after a section of rapids, their sunny scene changed - a brown bear cub was drowning in a whirlpool.

"So we're getting closer and closer and this thing starts screaming," said Mike Polocz, Klepacki's father and Alaska H2O Pros owner. "And we're like, 'What do we do here? What do we do here?'"

The sow and another cub watched from shore, frightened off by the approaching boat as the three assumed their roles.

Polocz grabbed a net, Klepacki gripped the oars and their friend Charlie Mettiale filmed from his iPhone.

Polocz said he was trying to bump the bear out of the whirlpool with the net. If he could do that, he said, then the bear could swim ashore.

But the more they tried, the more the two parties fumbled. The whirlpool just spun the boat in circles, Polocz said, and the bear became increasingly frantic.

"It was just so stressed, so stressed," he said. "Looking in its eyes, it was just saying 'Help me, please. Help me.'"

If it could have, he said, it would have crawled into the boat.

Finally, the current pressed the cub against the boat, he said, pinning it just long enough for him to nudge it into slower water.

The cub then swam ashore.

"The really weird thing (happened) at the end of it," Klepacki said. "He laid on the beach, all pooped and tired, and he just looked at us and cried one time and ran away, like saying, 'Thank you.' I just don't think that's ever going to happen to me or my dad or anybody I know for the rest of my life. That's a once-in-a-life-time thing."

Klepacki said that by the end of the ordeal, his father was shaking, with tears in his eyes.

"It was the most amazing thing that has happen to me since I was able to carry the American flag on the field at the Chicago-Minnesota game after 9/11," Polocz said. "Those emotions were the same when that bear caught that (net). It was spectacular."

Although their story had a happy ending, Polocz said it could have been far worse.

He was worried the cub would drown or, in its desperation, would crawl in the boat. If either happened, he said, the mother might have charged them.

"It could have went south in a hurry," he said, "and the story could have had a very unhappy ending as far as us drowning the bear and Mom coming out and saying, 'I'm killing all three of you guys.'"

Polocz was also ready to jump in, despite the water's temperature. As an ex-white water guide, he said he knew he would have only lasted 45 seconds.

"The chances were worth it because I could not have lived with myself if I would have just passed that thing up and had to watch it drown," he said.

In hindsight, Polocz said they should have conducted the rescue differently.

He said he would have preferred to drop anchor, leash a life jacket to the boat and throw it to the cub.

"It would have grabbed that life jacket," he said. "It would have held on. We would have been able to row that thing right out of the eddy, instead of being the Three Stooges trying to get it out of there (the way we did)."

From the time they left Jim's Landing, and on the trip back to Skilak Lake, they did not see a single person. Had they left five minutes later, Polocz said they would not have saved the cub.

"It was like it was meant to happen," he said.

[Sourdough]

Got this from todays Fairbanks Daily News Miner.
 Four grizzly bears killed in Healy   by  Kris Capps/For the News-Miner   Aug 03, 2012 | 6688 views | 11 | 24 | |            HEALY — A sow grizzly bear that rampaged through Healy this week continued to elude biologists the past two days, but all three of the sow’s yearling cubs have been shot and killed near Lignite Road.

The quartet of bruins cut a swath through Healy the past week, killing livestock and terrorizing residents by trying to break into homes.

Another grizzly bear — not attached to the marauding group — also was shot and killed Friday when it walked into a warehouse occupied by workers at Usibelli Coal Mine.

“It was an old male, in very poor condition, with many parasites (worms), and three legs,” said Cathie Harms, spokesman for the Alaska Department of Fish and Game. “It had entered the building, with workers — not what normal bears do — and was taken, in a justified case of defense of life and property.”

State biologists planned to travel to Healy again Friday night to search for the sow.

Two of the cubs that were killed already had shotgun pellets in them. After they were killed, the sow and third cub continued to approach three separate houses, Harms said.

“The danger level is escalating,” Harms said early Friday.

She noted that biologists have had no success in rehabilitating any bear that has learned to associate humans with food.

In Healy, residents kept each other alert through phone lines and Facebook postings.

The bears tried to shove down doors at the Mercer ranch house.

When Brent Keith yelled at them in his yard, the sow charged his house. When the bear didn’t break through the window, it crawled up on his new car, pounded on it and scratched it, Keith told a biologist.

Biologists in Fairbanks weren’t aware of the severity of the bear problem until it was already out of hand.

“Now we’re faced with bears with bad habits,” biologist Dick Shideler said. “It definitely complicates things.”

Biologists usually don’t relocate problem bears anymore.

“If it’s a problem bear, we’re just moving the problem for somebody else to deal with,” biologist Tony Hollis said. “We’re making it somebody else’s problem.

“If you don’t move them a long ways, they’ll come back to the same area.

“And it’s a liability. If you move a problem bear and it kills somebody or tears up horses, it’s a liability.”

Relocation might be attempted for young bears, but rarely for an aggressive sow, biologists said.

The biologists gave residents this advice: Keep all potential bear food locked up so bears can’t reach it.

That can include barbecues, bird feeders and freezers. Biologists said they heard a rumor that the bears found a cooler full of Chitina salmon at one house.

“Once they know they can snoop around a house and get something to eat, it’s tough to stop them,” Shideler said. “They’re already conditioned now. And her being aggressive makes it that much more difficult.”

He said ADFG gets calls periodically about bears sniffing around homes every year.

“This is the worst one in a while, for sure,” Shideler said.

Read more:  Fairbanks Daily News-Miner - Four bears killed in Healy

[magooch]

They had better hope that PETA, or the Humane Society doesn't hear about this.

[Sourdough]

We've already ran them out of the state.  Priscilla Ferrell and Friends Of Animals have quite coming up here to protest as well.  Defenders Of Wildlife are the only group that still comes up here.  They will soon discover no one listens to them up here either.